Below are the notes from Ellen's presentation at the Grace Baptist Missions Conference in Oct., 2016. These are for the benefit of those who missed it and have asked for a recording. Unforunately there was no recording, but these notes contain most of the content. They are simply notes, not a polished blog post, but I hope they bless you! Ellen

​Two World Views Collide

1 Peter 3:15 says:…but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.

This verse summarizes the challenge that we all have to be prepared to offer people hope whether we are sharing the gospel with them for the first time, or talking to them about a life struggle of some sort.

At any given time, we are all struggling with something. And most everyone around us is also struggling with something in life. Do we know how to biblically speak in to those struggles?

I am the founder and executive director of Word of Hope Ministries, and feel really privileged to share the ministry with you. I get to speak at various events around the country but there is nothing like sharing with your own church family. So, thank you for having me.

Word of Hope Ministries is a biblical counseling and training organization here in Santa Maria. We also have an online presence. We are a 501c3 and have been functioning as such for about 2 years now, although the ministry has existed in various forms for about 13 years.

The story of Word of Hope Ministries begins with my own story. To share with you how I came to believe that biblical counseling is God's plan for helping people in the local church, I need to tell you how I came to that conclusion.

Word of Hope Ministries began when two world views collided.

I did not become a Christian until I was 30. Prior to that, I would have told you I was an atheist. My entire worldview and belief system was secular, humanistic psychology that was prevalent then and still is.

I thought that all of life's answers were held in that realm, and that any problem you had could be addressed by it.

I worked in psychiatric Occupational therapy in my 20’s and was very entrenched in that as a career that I thought would be lifelong. I worked in private psychiatric hospitals with all ages and diagnosis and I loved my work.

When I was in the middle of that career, I hit my first really heavy personal life crisis. Our first baby was born with a genetic disorder and she died in my arms at two days old.

Before that, nothing very bad had ever happened to me. In order to deal with the trauma and grief, I delved back in to my work in psychology and psychiatry.

But after this tragedy, psychology just came up empty. I spent about 7 years back in my work trying to apply the theories and methods of psychology that I taught my patients.

I told everyone I was fine.

I was not fine. I was having confusing thoughts about life and death that did not make sense to me with my atheistic worldview. I had believed that when you die, you are simply gone. But then I wondered why my child was born only to live for 2 short days.

I did not know how to grieve that loss. Long story short, a good friend started sharing the gospel with me. It made me angry, but over time, I wanted to know more.

We wrote back and forth for a few months. Eventually, I read a letter from her that clearly spelled out the gospel, and I just knew it was true. I believed that Jesus died for my sins and that I was forgiven.

This was all a huge shock to me at the time! It seemed that I became a believer overnight, but looking back I can see the progression it really was as God pursued me.

We started going to church. I heard things like "we are all born sinners". Wait a minute, I would say to myself, how can that be? My professional training says that people are born inherently good, they just need help to build up their strengths and self esteem.

Two world views had just collided in a big way.

Eventually I left that career behind and spent the next many years raising our six kids.

I had been a Christian for several years when I realized that I was carrying some guilt I had not really dealt with, so I thought. So, I went on a quest to explore my old passion of psychology at the same time as searching the bible, and tried to learn how to forgive myself by mixing the two.

In that quest, through a friend who knew my struggles, I came across the ministry of biblical counseling. With help, I learned that I had some thinking that was much more pop psychology than it was biblical. It was finally time for my old worldview to go.

I learned that forgiving yourself is not found anywhere in the bible. It is not there. We hear this all the time "you really need to forgive yourself" or "I just can't forgive myself".

This is unbelief.

We do not need to pay for something that has already been paid for. Jesus paid it all…is enough. My thinking was held over from my old worldview...forgiving yourself comes straight out pop psychology, not out of the bible.

That so changed my thinking as I learned to rest in Christ’s forgiveness. I began to pursue this thing called biblical counseling. I wanted to know what other ideas I had that were engrained in my thinking but not necessarily biblical.

I became interested in what I was learning about biblical counseling because it clicked so well for me, and eventually I became passionate about it.

I got some training and became a certified biblical counselor, that was about 13 years ago. The more I learned and am still learning, the more I have had faulty thinking adjusted from my former worldview to a biblical worldview. We are all a work in progress.

Since then, I have been compelled to counsel others with the hope of the Gospel and the truth of Scripture.

I started volunteering as a counselor in my church, which quickly grew to a full time need. Later, I pulled it out of the church and started a small counseling business. Then, more recently, that business incorporated and became a 501c3 nonprofit. That is how we function now.

By "we", I mean myself, my board of directors, and some volunteer staff.

Biblical counseling is simply discipleship. If you consider it that way, it is easier to realize that it is not only for those with special training, but to some degree it is for every believer. It is the personal application and ministry of the Word of God.

It is not a new thing invented in recent church history. It is actually the return of what is old...based on the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture to address our spiritual needs. We base that, in part, on:

2 tim 3:16-17: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Biblical Counselors believe that the best place for helping believers is the local church. So as much as WOHM is a parachurch ministry, our mission and vision are all about the local church. We serve the church by counseling and training people to biblically help those in their sphere of influence.

Here is a really good explanation that I am going to quote from the Biblical Counseling Coalition website:

Biblical counseling is an approach to counseling that uses the Bible to address the issues in the lives of individuals, couples, and families. The Bible teaches that our thoughts, motives, attitudes, words, and actions flow from the sinful selfishness of our hearts. Biblical counseling addresses the heart as the source of these human actions and reactions using the wisdom and approaches revealed in the Bible.

Biblical counseling is practical and effective. It does not view people as simply spiritual beings with spiritual problems; instead the biblical counselor sees the individual as a physical, emotional, cognitive, and relational being. One focus of biblical counseling is to help others develop a biblical worldview of their life and recognize the core truth that guides right thinking and actions. The goal of biblical counseling is spiritual maturity.

That resonates with me after all that God has shown me about my own heart and faulty thinking, things that needed to be biblically addressed so that I could begin to mature spiritually beyond the unbiblical thinking.

And after doing this ministry for 13 years, I can say for sure that it works. That is because God's Word works...it is true, authoritative, infallible, inspired, and sufficient to address life's struggles.

I have seen hundreds of people find faith, joy, freedom, healing, and spiritual growth as God changes their hearts in counseling.

Biblical Counseling targets the heart, instead of focusing just on behavior or feelings. Really every problem or issue we have, no matter the cause, has a spiritual component. Every problem is either connected to sin, or to suffering.

This is actually good news, because there is a remedy for this....and it's the gospel.

We help people connect the gospel to their struggles with sin and suffering, and then we also teach them to rely on God's promises, to follow His principles, to obey His commands, to trust in His sovereignty.

We counsel people to think biblically about all matters of life.

I would say that biblical counseling is a branch of discipleship, but I would add that it is intensive discipleship. It is deeply theological and practical.

So, biblical counseling is a gospel ministry.

I want to share with you our formal Mission and Vision statements:

Our Mission: Word Of Hope Ministries assists people who are facing life’s struggles. This is accomplished by using Christian principles to counsel individuals and families in need and by training others to competently counsel and mentor in their local churches.

Our Vision: To expand Word Of Hope Ministries to its potential capacity in order to fulfill our mission to meet counseling, mentoring and training needs locally and globally.

We have some exciting things happening right now as we are seeing this vision unfolding.

God has been kind to this ministry, taking us through some very rough spots and surprising us with unexpected opportunities that have grown us and strengthened our faith as individuals and as a team.

Here's a few of the blessings we are experiencing right now:

I have been privileged to be among a handful of women added to the global organization known as the Biblical Counseling Coalition, where I serve on the Council Board.

This has opened up opportunities for me and WOHM to be connected to the national and global movement of biblical counseling in to a fresh, new and healthy season of unity, camaraderie, and consistency in what we offer as biblical counselors and counseling organizations. All of this is important to me, and to Word of Hope.

It is a very exciting time to be involved in biblical counseling.

We were also able to get certified as an official training center for the International Association of Biblical Counselors a couple years ago, which has been great. That enables us to see our vision unfolding as more counselors are raised up here locally, and also in other places with our distance training option.

These opportunities are fairly new for women, and my female colleagues and I feel like pioneers in some ways.

We are very close to hiring additional counselors to work with me, and I am super excited to be able to have a team of counselors to work with. All of that is pending, and when it unfolds, we will be able to offer counseling for more people, both men and women, couples and teens.

Just this past summer, I did some revamping of my board of directors, and am still working on that. In fact, you all know a few of my board members because they go to Grace.

They are Cheryl George, Shirley Decker, Judy Johnston. We have 3 churches represented, and 7 total men and women on the Word of Hope Board currently, and hope to grow that number as well.

So, a growing bod and a growing staff. This is all so great because we can accomplish so much more counseling and training than I could ever do working by myself, which I did for the first decade of this ministry.

We want to spread gospel hope and help around our community through the ministry of biblical counseling, and with more people trained there will be more potential to offer help and hope through our counselors and organization.

So, to clarify the services we currently offer:

We of course offer 1:1 counseling. Primarily, I have counseled women, teen girls, and some couples. Very soon we hope to add a male counselor to the staff, which will mean that we can offer more couples counseling and counseling for men and teen boys. This is all underway.

As I said, we offer training in biblical counseling. In fact, a new class is starting in a few weeks, so please talk to me soon if you are interested in that.

It is not just for those wanting to become counselors..it really is for anybody who wants to grow deeply themselves and then gain some tools for any kind of discipleship ministry they are involved in.

You can learn more about it on the ministry website, I have brochures and cards for you if you would like the web address and my contact information.

We also have another unique training program. I teach a class that I wrote about what I call biblical mentoring. I teach that in area churches by invitation, and there is an online version that people can do from anywhere, too.

This is actually one thing that sets WOHM apart from other counseling organizations as I focus a lot of my time speaking and writing on intergenerational ministry and mentoring, with a strong emphasis on counseling and mentoring teens - those articles are shared on various blog sites.

What I and WOHM get to do is frontlines ministry.

This ministry is on the frontlines and yet often unseen. I can’t share a lot of specific stories about people who benefit from our counseling, because they entrust those things in confidence to their counseling team and really those are their stories to tell, not mine.

But after doing this for 13 years, I can tell you that it is often difficult, it is intense, and it can be exhausting. But, I am not complaining. It is incredibly rewarding as we get to watch God move in lives and change hearts right in front of us.

I would not trade that for anything, really. I only share what I have so that you can understand a bit more of what we do at WOHM, and why we need your support. We need prayer support most of all.

And we need financial support to be able to stay afloat.

Financially, God provides and we trust Him. But one thing that I have had to learn is that unless we express our need, people will miss out on partnering with us.

I was listening to the radio last week, and they were doing a funding drive, asking for donors, weaving their requests in and out of their programming. I remember hearing those funding drives so many times in the past and getting annoyed, even changing stations and wishing I could just hear the music and not the asking for money.

Until I became the director of a nonprofit. Now I get it. Those radio stations cannot exist without support. And how do people consider supporting them unless they are asked.

Funding is currently our biggest need. Word of Hope will cease to function if we don’t get the funding we need as we continue in this season of growth.

Our funding allows us to rent office space, we are very soon going to outgrow our current space and are starting to look at options for more office space, which is very expensive. Our funding also allows us to purchase counseling resources, pay the bills, pay for programs, and pay staff.

We are nowhere near being fully funded. So, please pray for us in this and grab a brochure or card and let us know if you would like to partner with us.

I want to end with this passage. This is why we do what we do:

Ephesians 4:11-1611 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, 14 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. 15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Lord, I pray for those in our midst who are suffering and struggling, that we would be people who always stand ready to share the reason for the hope that we have.

Thank you for the hope the gospel provides...hope for salvation and hope for our sanctification as the gospel applies to our sin and suffering.

Thank you for your Word, and its sufficiency to address our every need.In Your name, Amen.